Why We Celebrate When You Cancel

There’s an email that lands in our inbox a few times a month that would send any normal subscription company into a panic spiral. It’s a cancellation notice. Specifically, it’s a cancellation notice with a reason attached, and the reason is some version of: “Met someone. Don’t need the account anymore. Thanks, guys.”

We frame those. Not literally — Pat’s office wall isn’t big enough — but in every way that matters.

When we receive a cancel subscription notice because a paying subscriber has met someone, that’s basically every great holiday wrapped up into one email notification.

— Casey Tebo, LFGdating co-founder

I said that years ago and I’ll stand on it today, because it’s the whole company in one sentence. We built a subscription business whose favorite email is the one where the subscription ends.

The uncomfortable math everyone else is doing

Think about what a mainstream dating app’s quarterly earnings call needs. It needs monthly active users going up. It needs revenue per user going up. It needs engagement — opens, swipes, session length — going up. Now ask: what happens to all three of those numbers when a user finds a great relationship?

They crater. A happy couple is, from the perspective of an engagement-driven balance sheet, two churned accounts. Which means the most profitable user is the one who almost finds someone, forever. Nobody at those companies is twirling a mustache about it — incentives don’t need villains, that’s what makes them incentives. The product simply drifts, quarter by quarter, toward whatever keeps you swiping. And prices drift too — up as much as 200% over the past decade, per the Groundwork Collaborative — because a user who can’t leave is a user you can charge more.

The game design analogy is obvious to anyone who’s played a gacha: the pity system isn’t there for pity. It’s tuned to keep you pulling.

Our two bottom lines

When Pat and I started this thing — a high school English teacher and a Marine officer, 4,200 miles apart, coordinating over late-night calls like the world’s least glamorous raid group — we wrote down the order of operations, and it hasn’t changed: the first bottom line is how many people are meeting and communicating on a daily basis. The second bottom line is financial. In that order. On the days those two conflict, the first one wins, and the cancellation emails are the proof of concept.

This wasn’t a cheap principle to keep, for the record. In the early years I turned down two coaching opportunities — including a varsity head coaching job — and a shot at teaching a higher-level curriculum, which is not a casual move for a non-tenured teacher, all to keep enough hours in the day for this site. Pat was building it from a Marine posting in Hawaii. Neither of us did that so we could someday optimize session length.

That ordering only works because we never took the engagement deal. No investors demanding quarterly swipe growth. No metrics team A/B testing how to make you open the app when you’re sad. Just two founders — one of whom is up at 4:45 a.m. working on the site, one of whom answers member emails at midnight from a personal address, both of whom have hosted Reddit AMAs and answered the awkward questions in public.

So what’s the $15 actually for?

Fair question, given everything above. If we’re not farming engagement, why charge at all?

Because the paywall is the bouncer. Bots and scammers operate at scale, and scale can’t afford invoices — so a modest premium tier plus a human being reviewing every single profile keeps the community real in a way the big apps spend millions in machine learning failing to match. The $15 pays for the spam wall, the human review, the servers, and two guys who answer their own support email. It is priced like a lunch on purpose: trivially affordable for a person, structurally ruinous for a bot farm.

What it’s not for: boosts, super likes, priority queues, or any other consumable designed to be repurchased. We don’t sell those. A dating site selling you repeated chances at attention is a slot machine with a profile picture.

The deal we’re offering

Here it is, plain: the free tier is genuinely playable — full profile, daily matches, and the right to reply to any premium member’s message, forever. Premium is for the day you want to make the first move yourself. And when it works — when you meet your Player 2 and cancel — we will be over here, unironically delighted, adding your email to the pile that keeps this whole weird business model running.

The long version of the origin story lives on the Why LFG page. The short version fits in your pocket: grab the app, raise your LFG flag, and give us the good kind of churn.

Stay classy,
Casey (and Pat, who has been up since 4:45 and would like everyone to know it)